Jurors Held Feelings In Check Until Verdict Was In, One Says

Jurors Kept Feelings In Check Till Verdict Was In

Jurors in the Hartford mob trial were told not to let sympathy play a part when they considered racketeering charges against eight members or associates of the Patriarca crime family.

And they didn't, one juror said Friday.

They listened carefully to the evidence, taking nearly 15 days to deliberate the complex charges. But when they came back with guilty verdicts Thursday, they had trouble putting their feelings aside.

"All of us had a lot of emotion coming in with the verdicts," juror William Calhoun said Friday. "We're not allowed to consider sympathy, but yesterday sitting in court hearing the [mobsters' family members] moaning and crying, we felt sympathy. We'd have to be very hard people not to feel something for everyone involved."

"I tried to block it out," said jury foreman Donald Gesswin. "You hear the crying in the courtroom, see the gestures people make. I just tried to stare at one focal point."

The jurors spent more than three months listening to tales of mob activities in New England, including gambling, loansharking, bodies buried in a Hamden garage, and the murder of mob underboss William "The Wild Guy" Grasso. But the jurors said they do not fear they will be targets of retaliation after delivering verdicts that could put some of the defendants -- those convicted in the Grasso killing -- in prison for life.

"Nobody seemed hesitant to arrive at their conclusion," said Calhoun, a 27-year-old restaurant worker.

He reasons that mobsters tend to kill other mobsters. "The Mafia seems to work internally," Calhoun said. "I think if they wanted to make any overture it would have happened during deliberations or before. Obviously, from what we heard we knew the Mafia exists in the area."

Juror Freda McCluskey agreed. "I'm not afraid," she said. "I think they would go after [informer John F. `Sonny'] Castagna or someone like that. I don't think they'd be after us."

discuss the three-month trial. He said he wanted to explain the jury's thinking about one aspect of the verdict that lawyers in the case were calling illogical.

Jurors concluded that two of the defendants, Gaetano Milano and Louis J. Failla, were guilty of a racketeering conspiracy when they attended a secret mob induction ceremony. But the jury also concluded that attendance by itself was not a crime. Lawyers found that contradictory.

Calhoun said the jury believed that the family members had formed a conspiracy, but that the government had not proved that they participated in a criminal act stemming from the conspiracy.

Calhoun said, "The charge was over 100 pages long. Not being lawyers ourselves we did the best we could."

Calhoun said the jury was able to return with guilty verdicts despite having serious doubts about the two informers who formed the basis of the government's case.

"Almost every juror in that room had hesitation over believing Sonny Castagna and Jackie Johns," Calhoun said. "You would have to be naive to take all their statements at face value." But Calhoun said the jurors were able to convict the defendants because of government evidence, including hundreds of hours of secretly recorded conversations, that corroborated the testimony by Castagna and his son, Jack Johns.

"Without that the verdicts might have been different," Calhoun said.

The jurors agreed that they learned a lot from the experience -- about people, about law, and about backgammon, a favorite game during long waits in the jury room. They also said they are glad it's over.